The GOP/tea party has been promising for years to offer a proposal for replacing the Affordable Care Act with a plan that would move the country toward universal health care coverage. Now, at long last, one of the tea party’s best minds and most innovative thinkers has revealed the basics of the tea party plan for health-insurance reform. Here it is:

“The plan is to allow those things that had been proposed over many years to reform a health-care system in America that certainly does need more help so that there’s more competition, there’s less tort reform threat, there’s less trajectory of the cost increases, and those plans have been proposed over and over again. And what thwarts those plans? It’s the far left. It’s President Obama and his supporters who will not allow the Republicans to usher in free market, patient-centered, doctor-patient relationship links to reform health care.”

Every word in this salad is either a lie or simply wrong, of course. The current system, the one that is broken, has been so deregulated over the years in favor of giant insurance corporations that it enabled them to winnow out the poor and the sick so that it only sold policies to the healthy and the wealthy and those who were covered by their employers.

That is the problem. That fact is the source of the crisis. These giant corporations could solve the problem tomorrow without government intervention, by coming up with effective policies that everyone could afford — just as auto insurers have done across the country.